clear as mud
by iciiing
Summary: Kaito really hates mornings. —au, multichapter. diamondship.
1. 7 am, waking up (too early)

a/n: whhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaattt to heck i don't even diamondship Why This  
warnings: college age kaito+the f word. have fun.  
disclaimer: zexal ends in nine weeks farewell me

* * *

seven am, waking up (too early) in the morning

* * *

"IMA KAKO MIRAI-"

"No, fuck you." Kaito lobs his phone at the wall without a second thought and rolls over, trying and failing to drown out the riffs of REDMAN's _Challenge the Game_ echoing around his room. "Fuck you, fuck mornings, fuck this stupid loud song from a band I don't listen to," he continues into his pillow, glaring at the digital readout from the clock next to him. 7:34 in the morning. Who in the hell wakes up at 7:34 in the morning?

_More accurately, _chimes a small voice in his head, _who in the hell worked their schedule so they could get all the early classes and come back home to sleep? You, that's right, so wake up and deal with it._

Groaning at his conscience, Kaito drags himself out of bed and grabs a towel and yesterday's jeans off the floor. He really should go wash his clothes but he can't be bothered to solicit a list of which dryers actually work from Durbe, so he puts it to the back of his mind and focuses on finding his deodorant.

Come to think of it, he hasn't seen his roommate in a week. Kaito stands under the cold shower spray—cold because some piece of shit used up all the dorm floor's hot water already and now everyone has to wait an hour, after which there will be a scramble for the shower and the cycle will repeat—and tries to feel concerned about this. Then he remembers that Durbe is an architecture major and that the studio carries two refrigerators and a spare room full of hammocks and blankets for a reason (that reason being the staggering workload they receive every semester.) His roommate will likely not be back until the weekend.

Kaito exits the bathroom, hangs up his towel on the back of the door, thinks vaguely about cleaning up so he can find the lab manual that's been missing for a week. Clothes get dumped into the black hamper he picked up from IKEA a month ago, empty packages of pretzel Goldfish and fruit snacks garnish the already-overflowing trash can, the purple 3DS that he doesn't remember touching after the first week of class lies forgotten on his dresser along with the small box of card packs Haruto sent him. They're new ones, too—Judgment of the Light, Shadow Specters, Lord of the Tachyon Galaxy—and Kaito wondered at first why ten packs of cards from a game that he hasn't played in years were waiting for him at the reslife office after class until he opened the letter and saw Galaxy-Eyes Photon Dragon along with a rather beat up piece of paper wishing him good luck in Haruto's messy scrawl. Although Kaito hasn't the heart to open a single one, the note has since joined the handful of other stuff taped onto his wall: a post-it reminding him to get a new prescription because his current reading glasses suck, a drawing from his notes that he was thinking about digitizing until his stylus vanished from the face of this planet, a Cardfight! Vanguard poster originally left to die on the floor of the student lounge…

Kaito's stomach chooses this exact moment to remind him that it exists, so he sticks both halves of a cinnamon raisin bagel in the minuscule toaster before continuing to search for his forgotten physics manual. He's under the bed fighting dust bunnies the size of his fist for possession of the thin green book when there's a knock at the door.

"Who is it?" calls Kaito, sneezing as he extricates himself from beneath the bed frame.

"RA," is the curt response. "Floor inspections are today."

Kaito dimly recalls seeing the flyer and once again wishes for an actual calendar instead of the phone which he forgets to check half of the time. Scooping it up from the desk, he notes that there is indeed an inspection scheduled for today, and—wow, okay, this room is still a train wreck and his beloved toaster sure is on the list of stuff that's not allowed in the dorms. There's nothing he can do about it now, so he opens the door with his bagel in hand and comes face to face with Rio Kamishiro.

Rio is something of a legend on campus. She joined every sport the school offered in her first week of college, which some chalked up to overenthusiastic freshman syndrome until she outdid everyone. At everything. (Rumor has it that the only person able to hold her off was Kotori Mizuki, the captain of the fencing team.) It's an utter mystery to Kaito why she is even at his doorway.

"_God,_ how many people are going to stare at me like that? My idiot of a brother got a stomach virus this morning and I have to take over his job for a few-_ooo,_ is that a bagel?"

"...yes?" Kaito blinks. Blinks again. If Rio came with sound effects, he's pretty sure she would be sparkling right now. "Why?"

Rio side-eyes the bagel. "If you set me up with one of those, your room is spotless and your toaster doesn't exist."

"Deal. They're on top of the microwave." Kaito yanks on his boots and retrieves his wallet from his backpack.

"I would put on a shirt if I were you," calls Rio after him. She's going through his refrigerator now, most likely in search of butter to go with her purloined breakfast. "Did you know the wind chill is -4?"

_...Ah. _Kaito glances down and comes to the belated realization that he is, indeed, lacking a shirt. With an inward sigh, he tugs a black tee over his head and decides that today is just gonna be one of those days where anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and he should probably hurry if he doesn't want to get accosted by his own personal storm cloud or something.

Rio's laughter dances in his ears as he heads down the tiled hallway, and Kaito begins to seriously consider reevaluating his life.


	2. quarter to 8, got a headache (&coffee)

a/n: ayyyyyyy where be my diamondshippers please take the second chapter of my writing experiment  
disclaimer: waves a tissue in zexal's direction (someday i'll watch the 6th season with subs lmao)

* * *

it's a quarter to eight and i've got a headache (and a coffee)

* * *

Strangely enough, Kaito's run-ins with Rio Kamishiro begin to align themselves with the potentially embarrassing events that foist themselves upon his existence.

He forgets about the potential dangers posed by sitting in the front of the chemistry lecture hall until the instructor lights a hydrogen-filled balloon aflame and subsequently removes several centimeters from his hair, after which Rio offers her condolences on his SnapChat rise to glory. He wakes up from an afternoon nap to discover that his ID-slash-pillow is bent past all recognition; Rio catches him trying to bang it back into shape with a Vernier caliper. The next day, he runs into her (literally) after forking over the $25 for another identification card; she scoops up her books from the floor and hands him his new ID while informing him that he looks like a turnip. By the time he swipes Galaxy-Eyes through the card reader at Starbucks, he's fully expecting to catch a flash of azure hair in his line of sight.

He's not wrong. Of course, she is at the same Starbucks he is, on the same campus that hosts the same amount of potential other places to retrieve coffee and/or one of those strangely colored teas with some type of Jell-O bubble in them.

"That kind of week, huh?" Rio asks him as he retrieves his café latte, and Kaito almost replies with a sarcastic "wouldn't you know it" before realizing that yeah, it sure _has_ been that type of week, hasn't it, because he almost set his hair on fire and tripped over a whole entire _person _and spent most of his food money on a piece of plastic because he stayed up late to study for the chemistry common that he's 80 percent sure he failed anyway, and…and now this. He takes a sip of coffee and charbroils his tongue before sitting down at a table, kicking a chair out for Rio as an afterthought.

"I think," begins Kaito, when he has recovered sufficiently, and Rio puts down her venti whatever to listen. "I think that you are a sentient and highly-specific bad luck charm." He regrets the words as soon as they come out of his mouth, regrets this entire conversation actually because the most interaction he's had with this girl is "hi" and "you're not wearing a shirt, are you, maybe you should do something about that."

"_I _think that is one of the worst pickup lines in the history of…ever, really." Rio shakes her head in sympathy. "It really is an off week, isn't it?"

"I've never tried to pick up…" _Anyone._ "A girl."

"Wow, sad." Rio scoffs at him before continuing. "What makes you think I'm a bad luck charm, anyways? For all I know, it could be the card you keep in your wallet."

"It's _not _Galaxy-Eyes." Kaito's chair scrapes harshly on the tiled floor as he stands up to leave. He doesn't particularly care what gets said about him, but he _does_ care what gets said about the card his little brother went to a shit ton of trouble to get. (And he knows that for a fact, because you don't just pull a ghost rare out of a card pack.)

"_Stop right there," _orders Rio, and it's her glower rather than her words that halts Kaito in his tracks, because she's taking knife glares to chainsaw level and. Wow. "You don't just tell a girl she's a walking bad luck charm and then _leave. _Who the hell taught you manners?"

Kaito almost answers Gauche before remembering _wait, Rio doesn't know Gauche,_ and while he's filing this particular fuckup under D for Dodged Bullets Rio is steamrollering over whatever he may or may not have said in the interim. "Consider us closer acquaintances than normal for the next week, because I am going to prove you wrong…"

There is a rather pregnant pause. Belatedly, Kaito supplies his name.

"Kaito Tenjo," Rio repeats, leaning across the table until she's inches from his face. Unbidden, a chill goes up Kaito's spine.

"Are you good at physics?"

Still largely unnerved, Kaito responds with a shrug that's barely there because yeah, he's good at physics, he's very good at physics, it's the one class that saved his GPA after a semester's worth of daydreaming—hang on a second, she's not _serious-_

"Architecture library, tomorrow afternoon." Rio picks up Kaito's coffee and finishes it for him.

"That was mine." Kaito stares at the empty cup she places neatly in front of him.

"Bad luck charm," singsongs Rio cheerfully, already walking away. Backwards, no less. "Don't be late!"

Kaito watches her go until she's swept up in the morning-class rush and wonders how he's supposed to convince Haruto that this isn't a date.


	3. time's tickin' on and on and on (and on)

a/n: can anyone guess where i'm getting the titles from (PIPER NOT U) (ALSO thank you sooooooooooo muuuuuuuuuch for helping out with this sobs on u)  
disclaimer: lmaooooooo

* * *

time's ticking on and on and on and i'm rushing (for nothing).

* * *

All too soon, it's twelve fifty in the afternoon the next day and not only has Kaito not made any progress in convincing Haruto via Skype that _no, I do not possess any type of "game" besides the packs from the children's card game you keep sending me_ but he's fallen asleep on top of his homework again. Which, well, wouldn't be a problem except his homework was on his Dell and that has since shut down, and he doesn't know if it died or his hand smacked the power button while he was in stasis or if it crashed thanks to the string of letters and numbers his English homework has probably mutated into.

Oh, and he only has ten minutes to get to Rio at the architecture library and the physics book is still buried somewhere in his closet after that day someone Torrented it and passed the file around to everyone in the class.

Kaito fishes his charger out of the heater, tosses that and his laptop and a handful of paper and a pen into the black messenger bag lying limply on the floor. He scrubs the sleep out of his eyes and chances a look in the mirror to fix his hair and sort of wishes he didn't. He finds his Converse and grabs his phone and contemplates bringing food (Goldfish, fruit snacks, _something_) and then he's gone, taking the back stairs two steps at a time because the day the dorm's elevator starts to work properly is the day a piece of the sky will rocket down to earth and inflict him with a concussion.

He hits the pavement and he flies, and he gets a lot of strange looks and a few whistles and one recruitment offer from the captain of the track team. The College of Architecture and Design broadcasts its name from across the green in Very Large and Very Capitalized Letters, and Kaito shoulders his way through the glass doors, slides to the floor and decides that running should be banned.

There's a bubbler nearby, so after the black spots have receded from his vision Kaito gets to his feet and prods it tentatively with an elbow. It spits water at him rather hesitantly, and he winces as the lukewarm liquid hits the back of his throat. He's feeling better about walking, though, so he ditches the bubbler and heads for the elevators because like hell if he's hiking up those stairs.

The elevator beeps cheerfully at him on every floor, welcoming more people into its recesses, and Kaito has to elbow his way past two overenthusiastic students and a briefcase that may or may not have been solid steel before he can make his escape. He steps onto the fourth floor with a muted sigh of relief, scanning the colorful bookshelves stacked tall with architecture journals and the well-worn wooden tables and the posters and models covering almost every side surface and display case and spare easel for any sign of Rio.

She isn't here, but someone else is.

"Kaito?"

"Durbe," responds Kaito with some surprise. His roommate is standing in front of him with a boxcutter blade in one hand and a reasonable stack of journals in the other.

There's an awkward silence. Durbe adjusts his glasses, causing some of the books he is carrying to shift precariously; Kaito offers his assistance and the two haul the stack to the nearest table.

"It's...a bit of a surprise to see you here," admits Durbe, proffering a chair to Kaito before sitting down himself. "I thought engineers had the best parties on Saturdays."

"Wouldn't know. Never been to one." Kaito picks out the lime-green slice of a misplaced tome on a bookshelf of purple and stares at that instead of his pseudo-roommate. Friend. Whatever.

"Ah." Durbe drops the subject, and the conversation moves to small talk: the weather sure is warm for January, did you see the trash that was the math common exam, there's gonna be another League tournament soon. Durbe fidgets with the Bandaid on his left thumb; Kaito's mildly inquisitive stare prompts the other to sheepishly demonstrate the split-second blade movement that landed him this particular battle scar.

"Hi, Durbe!" A girl with gray hair and red-rimmed glasses approaches with an enthusiastic wave, and Kaito wonders if it's a thing for architecture students to walk around with knives and books in the same hand. "Still getting lost in the stacks?"

"His sense of direction is about that terrible," remarks Kaito before Durbe can respond.

The girl smiles and sticks out a hand. "I'm Cathy. It's great to meet you!"

"Kaito," responds Kaito, shaking her hand tentatively. "Likewise."

"Roommate, meet girlfriend. Girlfriend, meet roommate," interjects Durbe dryly.

"Congratulations?" offers Kaito, having not been aware of the fact that his roommate had a significant other and/or a life outside of school. Then again, he hasn't had a proper conversation with said roommate since the beginning of the month, probably, and even then that was solely to discuss moving-back-in-after-break arrangements ("Do you want me to put your bags anywhere?" "It's okay, half of it's going to the studio anyway." "Oh.")

Cathy laughs before tugging Durbe up by a sleeve. "Come on, Kotori will have our heads if we don't get back to studio soon."

"Ah, right…" Durbe gets to his feet, taking his stack of texts with him, and turns to face Kaito. "I suppose I'll see you around, then?"

"Mm." Kaito shrugs noncommittally, mainly because the only other time he's been here was in freshman year when they made everyone learn how libraries worked, and he doesn't actually know if Rio is or isn't in architecture-

Oh. _Shit._

* * *

Just as Kaito begins to consider transferring to somewhere that is not Heartland U in order to preserve several years of his life, the elevator beeps cheerfully behind him and slides open. This event would have had no effect on his thought process had it not been for the person who stepped off.

As it is, Rio Kamishiro is walking towards him with a wave and a smile, and Kaito is suddenly hyper-aware of the fact that his hair resembles a demented turnip from all the running he's done to get here and that there is a hole near the fringe of his hoodie, and why do _her_ pants get to match her shirt while _his_ pants are from two days ago and still have that splotch from when the idiot sitting next to him in lecture lost his grip on a Sharpie. It's utterly unfair, and Kaito relays as much to Rio after Durbe and Cathy have absconded to face their studio TA (likely using the twin stacks of books they have gathered from their time in the stacks as a legitimate excuse for their absence.)

Rio simply stares at him with a mixture of amusement and incredulity.

"Kaito Tenjo, are you_ sulking?_"

"_No!"_ responds Kaito adamantly, and maybe it comes out a little louder than normal because several other students turn to look at them. He unfolds his arms, sticks them in the pocket of his nondescript black hoodie with matching nondescript hole, and forces his scowl to become less pronounced. "No, I'm not sulking."

"Cute." Rio snickers and sits down at the table, swinging her backpack off one shoulder and removing a pen and a piece of paper. "So! Let's get started, shall we?"

Twenty minutes in, Kaito's mood hasn't improved much. They've pinpointed Rio's physics problem in that her notes are all peppered with doodles and scribbled reminders to buy milk and cup ramen; unfortunately, no such progress has been made on the frontier of actual learning.

Kaito sighs heavily as he spots a drawing of Meta Knight sketched neatly atop what was once Planck's constant. It's an excellent drawing for five minutes-he's never seen anyone use a single mechanical pencil with such dexterity.

"Rio, what's your major?"

"Graphic design," answers Rio without a moment's hesitation, frowning down at the paper in front of her. "I don't remember this equation existing, ever."

"That's because it doesn't." Kaito borrows her pencil and erases a 3, replacing it with the letter Epsilon.

"What about you?" Rio shoves away the sheets in front of her and balances her chair precariously on its back legs, keeping her balance with her left hand.

"Don't do that, you're going to fall," says Kaito automatically before clamping his mouth shut, because Rio is not Haruto and probably won't fall and break an arm like his younger brother did at the age of seven.

(Probably.)

"You must have siblings," notes Rio. "Or at least one, anyway."

_Dammit. _Kaito opens his laptop a little too forcefully and jabs at the power button.

"Oh, come on!" Rio huffs exasperatedly at him, snatching her pencil out of his hand. "I told you something about me, the least you can do is reciprocate! Geez…"

"_You _decided to place yourself in my presence, not me," answers Kaito, poking some more at his laptop; it makes some noises that are reminiscent of the lightrail cruising to a halt at Heartland Station rather than a piece of advanced technology booting up. Rio glances warily at it, but says nothing. "If you're not going to study, then find something else to do."

"Fine." Rio grabs an empty sheet of paper and slides off the chair, heading to the other end of the table.

* * *

Kaito swears at his laptop in every language that he knows; it responds by slowly and painfully loading the remnants of his English homework. He finds himself flipping through Rio's notes while he waits, correcting mistakes almost subconsciously and arranging them in date and topic order. _Why am I doing this, _he asks himself tiredly as he re-draws a graph that has too many lines on it (peering closer, he recognizes the distinctive spikes of her brother's hair scribbled on the head of the bicyclist careening down one slope) and he doesn't really have an answer for himself.

It's ridiculous, really, when he stops to think about this whole situation. This girl that he barely knows barges into his life and resolves to stay, all because of something that would be trivial to most people. And on top of that, she's bullying him into helping her study.

_It isn't like you had anything better to do this weekend, _chimes a voice in his head.

Kaito sighs and replaces the pen cap, his corrections done and his homework still loading. He stuffs Rio's notes in her binder, spares her a glance and notices she's still scribbling like a madman on something that is Obviously Not Physics. He stands up and walks around to examine what she's doing because really, what the hell, but the scolding words lodge themselves in his voice box.

It's a drawing. More specifically, it's a cartoon version of him and a monster that looks like it came right off the Yugioh card still in his wallet, except its edges are softer and it resembles Cloud more than Photon and also he's pretty sure that he wouldn't ever summon it using a catchphrase like "I summon a monster more savage than a supernova!"

Still. She's good. Kaito halts to watch her pencil dance across the page, turning him and Galaxy-Eyes Cloud (Photon?) Dragon into something sharper, fiercer. Rio adds a few lines to cartoon-Kaito's hair, makes a face, erases them and repeats the process somewhere else, and he fights the increasing urge to go back to the Baria dorm and burn all his sketchpads in the common room's shitty excuse for a fireplace.

From across the table, Kaito's computer whines slightly at being ignored and shuts itself off. Rio blinks, looks up, probably notices the distinct lack of his presence across from her and rocks her chair back to look around. Then she spots him hovering, and, yeah. Not a good combination.

Kaito manages to catch the back of the chair before it goes past his knee and returns Rio to her previously upright position. The words _I told you so_ almost pass his lips before Rio scowls and shoves the drawing at him with the cheerful addendum "Sorry my attention span sucks."

"You're," Kaito starts, stops, clears his throat and tries again. "You're giving this to me."

Rio rolls her eyes and shoves the piece of paper at him more insistently this time. "Just take it before I change my mind and send this into the same abyss my notes are going into."

"No they're not," replies Kaito instantly. "Not after I waded through all of that."

Rio's eyes widen; she snatches her binder and flips quickly through it, mumbling something that sounds vaguely like "thanks" in his direction. Kaito pretends not to hear as he crams his idiotic laptop back into his messenger bag. It's getting late, and since said laptop has been reassigned to the role of "biggest two-year-old in the history of ever" he still has to get to the computer lab and at least attempt to finish this draft.

"No, seriously." Rio watches him unplug his charger, gaze drifting to the table as she continues. "My attention span is shit in physics. I owe you one."

"Stop referring to my hair as a vegetable and we're even." Kaito grabs his hoodie from its place on the back of an abandoned chair before making tracks for the elevators. If he's lucky, the lab on the second floor will still be open.

"Not until you ditch that haircut, _strawberry blond_." Rio smirks at him as he steps onto the elevator, and the phrase "pick your battles" loops in Kaito's head all the way down.


	4. sittin' in the back seat (aka help)

a/n: \common exams!/  
a/n2: BLESS PIPER FOR BETA'ING OH MY GOD  
disclaimer: who else cried for zexal because i sure as hell did

* * *

**sitting in the back seat with friends in the front seat (is an experience)**

* * *

It's seven AM on a Saturday exactly two weeks after the architecture library and someone is banging on Kaito's door while he's in the shower. He mutters something unprintable and turns back to the water spray, which is actually warm for once because no college student in their right mind is conscious right now and as such, he's going to use as much hot water as he can without fucking up the delicate balance of the elements in the Baria dorm. Whoever it is, they can damn well wait.

"Kai-to! Open up!" yells Rio from the other side of the door, and Kaito cringes as her voice echoes down the hallway (because of course, Rio _would_ be the one exception to the rule that says _thou shalt not bang on thy neighbor's door at the crack of ass on a Saturday__._) He shuts off the shower and stomps out, trailing wet footprints across the bathroom floor as he wraps a towel around his midsection.

Rio appraises him critically as he wrenches open the door. "The no-shirt thing is nothing new, but have you noticed that you also seem to be lacking pants today?"

"I don't care," retorts Kaito, scowling at her with as much dignity as his slowly reddening cheeks will allow him.

Rio refrains from further comment, instead choosing to deposit a coffee and a muffin in his hands as she steps past him through the door. "Brought you breakfast. We've only got an hour before Anna and company take off and less than that to be seatbelted into the aggregation of nuts and bolts they call a car, so you have to hurry."

"Hurry," echoes Kaito with a sense of calm he does not feel, because Rio is in his room picking daintily around piles of assorted junk and grabbing a napkin for her crepe and sticking a bento box in his fridge and poking interestedly at the still-unopened card packs on his dresser. And, okay, they've...talked more, recently, and exchanged phone numbers and conducted lengthy diatribes through SMS and in person-mostly jibes about adverse luck and bad hairdos and_ if you call me a bad luck charm ever again I'm going to strangle you in your sleep because uh that's insulting,_ but sometimes it's _I picked up donuts _and_ stop drawing on your notes _and_ so...you watch Cardfight Vanguard?_-but he definitely never received any inclination that Rio intended to drag him out anywhere on a Saturday morning, and he's sure he would have vehemently refused if he had. Also his hair is sending streams of water down his back and it's fucking _cold,_ and has he mentioned that _he's wearing a towel and Rio is in his room_-

-and this coffee, it's a cafe latte with extra whipped cream and a sprinkle of chocolate shavings and the local Starbucks doesn't put chocolate shavings on a drink that's not, well, chocolate. He knows because he's asked before, and if that didn't push the beleaguered cashier over the edge then the Galaxy-Eyes through the card reader certainly did.

(It's...palatable, Kaito finds when he tastes it, and his stomach does an odd flip because the only other person in this universe who knows exactly how to make him a coffee shares a last name and a set of genes with him.)

"Hey, snap out of it!" Rio waves a hand in front of his face, causing him to jump and choke on the sip of coffee he's nursing. Unperturbed, she raises her voice over the sound of his coughing and continues. "I got the jump on Anna by making breakfast myself, but if she gets to the car first then we're all goners because neither she nor her boyfriend can drive. So get it in gear!"

She pushes him back in the direction of the bathroom, hands at the small of his back, and Kaito's dripping hair is suddenly not the sole cause of his goosebumps. He focuses on brushing off this new development while Rio hands him a Pokemon shirt he didn't know he possessed and a pair of jeans and some socks and tells him to get dressed and dry his hair because it looks even sadder when it's drooping.

* * *

Kaito towel-dries his hair in the mirror and decides that floating blond and teal halo is better than potential turnip reference, so he tosses what's left of the hair gel into the trash and runs a handful of moisturizer through it instead. It does look more normal, sort of, and he exits the bathroom feeling marginally better about answering the door in nothing but a Finding Nemo bath towel.

"Keep the hair," declares Rio with finality from her position near the door, and before Kaito can ask if that was her idea of a compliment she's gone and he's morally obliged to retrieve her forgotten crepe from his dresser and add it to his collection of wallet, keys, phone, and the coffee that he sort of wishes he could sit down and enjoy but he can't because Rio is urging him to _hurry up, trust me you do Not want Anna driving._

Kaito's legs are longer, but Rio is faster and comes with the added bonus of knowing exactly where she's going, so he has to jog slightly in order to keep up. He glances vaguely in the direction of the elevator and winces at the typed "BROKE" sign taped to its front.

"Is that...Comic Sans?"

"Don't look," advises Rio, only half-joking as she shoves open the staircase door.

* * *

By the time Kaito gets to the Astra dorm's gate (which is further than Baria, thanks, so let it not be said that he was walking slowly) Rio is following the signs to fifteen-minute parking. He remembers stopping his dad's pickup here and hauling assorted furniture into his dorm almost four semesters ago, back when the elevator worked and the heating system wasn't screwed and he was optimistic about college rather than a giant blob of_ school job homework sleep wake up cold shower school oh crap that lab report was due today, wasn't it._

Kaito shakes his head slightly to dispel the memories and ends up with a faceful of teal bangs. Irritated, he huffs them away from his face and stares at the only car in the parking lot, a dilapidated minivan the shade of newly-opened bubblegum.

"Yo! You!"

Not only is the potential death trap bright pink, its driver is painfully loud. Kaito grimaces. _Rio, where the hell did you go?_

"Dude with the Pokemon shirt!"

Kaito cringes, closing his eyes and crossing his fingers and hoping vehemently that another person is in this parking lot wearing the same shirt as him, or the same outfit as him, or that some sort of highly-specific natural disaster occurs or that he mysteriously gains the ability to switch bodies with the next person that walks by, something-_anything_-so that he doesn't have to enter the Bright Pink Abomination (because like hell if that thing that's spontaneously revving its engines and coughing up smoke and waving its back windshield wipers at absolutely nothing falls under the classification of "car.") But no, there's Rio sticking her head out of the sun roof and telling him to hurry his butt up or they'll run him down, and was that his imagination or did he hear someone mutter "good"? Either way, it's clear that he's expected, so he trudges off the sidewalk and in the direction of the Minivan-like Object while kicking aimlessly at patches of dirty snow.

* * *

The first thing Kaito thinks when he arrives is _holy shit people._ There's Rio, who promptly snatches her crepe back and pats the seat next to her while regaling him with a scathing "I _told_ you to hurry up, now Anna's driving and you'd better finish that coffee _now_ or it'll probably end up on Mizael" and Rio's infamous twin brother Shark, who gives him a dark look and turns back to contemplating his existence while staring out the window. (Kaito amuses himself with the idea that the latter's deep purple headphones are host to a myriad of Taylor Swift's songs.) Then there's Mizael-well, there's a pretty high chance it's Mizael, anyway, because the latter's wearing a classy white jacket and staring at Kaito's coffee cup like it's a loaded grenade-and two guys with similarly interesting hairstyles engrossed in what appears to be Pokemon. The front seat is currently occupied by a girl who's got her clunky Doc Martens propped against the dash and is poring over a CD case, tilting it so whoever's in the passenger seat can also see. Kaito makes out the phrase "FLAME OF LIFE" and a few words of Japanese (which, wow, he sure is out of practice) before the girl takes her feet off the steering wheel and leans around to inspect him.

"So you're the mysterious Kaito Tenjo, huh?" she asks, tilting her head and scrutinizing him suspiciously. Her fuschia hair falls to one side, revealing bright ginger roots, and Kaito wonders how long that dye job took.

"Oh, hey, it's Kaito!" One of the Pokemon players waves brightly at him, and Kaito recognizes one Yuma Tsukumo from the swim team. They cross paths sometimes at the gym, when Kaito gets the urge to do something more in the way of exercise than walking from class to class. "How's life?"

"Eh," Kaito informs him dully.

Yuma pats his shoulder a little too enthusiastically. "Don't worry about it! Today's gonna be great, you just wa-" He catches sight of his 3DS and lets out an undignified screech, whirling on his battle partner. "Alit, did you just land a _critical hit?_"

"Your stupid _Glaceon_ can eat it, Tsukumo!" crows Alit, promptly halting all pretenses of civil conversation.

Kaito sighs and rubs his forearm and drains the rest of his now-freezing coffee, fully intending to drift back to sleep until its effects begin to kick in. His head is halfway to Rio's shoulder when the van lurches violently and sends him plunging straight into the floor mats, banging his shoulder against Shark's chair on the way down.

"Oh," says Shark, a wicked smirk playing around the corners of his mouth as he scrolls through his playlist. "Did you actually think you'd get any _rest_ on this road trip?"

Kaito flips him the bird from his position on the floor next to Mizael's gray suede boots.

Mizael sighs and leans down slightly in Kaito's direction. "Shark's only being more of an ass than usual because he's convinced you have a crush on his sister."

Kaito accepts the gloved hand being offered to him and thinks about sinking back to the floor when he realizes that the appropriate window of denial for that statement has passed, but Mizael is already holding out a well-worn strap and politely informing him that seatbelts are important. By the time he's done wrangling with the buckle that was probably transplanted from another car, Anna is accepting song requests for the drive ahead.

"Something by Plastic Tree!"

"Ex-_cuuuse_ you, I think you meant something by _JAM Project_-"

"Just put in that mix of fourteen different versions of 'I Don't Care'."

"_Who the __hell__ mixed fourteen different versions of 'I Don't Care'?"_

"Hey! I spent a lot of time on that mix, I won't have you badmouthing it-"

"Play the Pokemon theme song!"

"_No,_ Yuma," choruses the entire van.

"Oh, come on!" Yuma crosses his arms and glares at Anna. "You played a whole bunch of Yugioh and Vanguard themes last week!"

"Vector's mix," Anna informs him smoothly.

"Oh, so your _boyfriend's_ the only one who gets to be a total nerd-"

The front seat dissolves into Anna and Yuma bellowing insults at each other.

"You're a stupid jerkface!"

"Oh, yeah? Well, your clothes don't match!"

"Yuma, can you click something already?" demands Alit, brandishing his red 3DS at the duo.

Both warring parties round on him. "Can't you see we're_ busy?_"

"You guys suck!" Alit pouts and sits back down, jabbing angrily at his game console.

Kaito turns to Mizael. "Does this happen often?"

"All the time," responds his seatmate tiredly. "REDMAN's gonna win out, Anna's holding their debut album."

Exactly sixty seconds later, the first song on the album's tracklist makes its exeunt from the startlingly clear sound system and pumps its opening riffs directly into Kaito's olfactory receptors. While he is contemplating the merit of holding a funeral for his dearly-departed sense of hearing, Mizael is extracting something from a side pocket and extending it to him.

"Here."

Kaito stares blankly at the nondescript box in Mizael's hands, prompting the other male to explain, "Precaution against carsickness. This helped me out the first one or two times."

"Ah." Kaito unwraps the stick of Trident and places it on his tongue. _Bubblegum. _

"Good thinking, Mizael," comments Rio, looking up from her phone. Kaito catches a glimpse of a half-finished message (_ kotocheer: ok, bazookagang's headed out. good luck with today's match!~_) before she sends it and swipes a finger across the screen, banishing her Twitter feed to a corner.

The issue of music having been resolved, Anna shifts cheerfully into first gear and removes her foot from the brake; thus begins the most terrifying journey Kaito has experienced in his nineteen and a half years of life.

* * *

The trip to the mall is a hellish hour of Yuma and Alit arguing the merits of Fairy versus Steel type Pokemon, Vector singing along to REDMAN's latest and Anna keeping up an almost constant stream of expletives at any car foolish enough to get in her way; watching the camaraderie, Kaito is glad he has managed to land optimal seating partners. Mizael is silently pondering the vaguely tree-shaped flashes of scenery traveling past the right window at eighty miles per hour, and Rio's got a battered spiral notebook in hand and a pencil halfway to her mouth. Her feet are up on the chair next to him, and Kaito is suddenly reminded of sitting _criss cross apple sauce, niisan!_ and he has to convince himself that the odd flip his stomach just did is simply a direct result of Anna's decision to drift that corner instead of executing a proper turn.

By some miracle, the transportation edifice that vaguely resembles a car arrives at its destination with itself and its cargo intact. Kaito is the last one to exit the pink double doors; he stumbles a little on the descent from the step and leans against the side door because wow, all right, that's not the proper orientation of the ground.

"It'll wear off," Rio says sympathetically, patting his shoulder. The effect is ruined when she adds, "I did warn you to hurry up, slowass."

Kaito doesn't register the steadying hand on his arm until the gang is almost inside Hitsue Mall, which is probably a good thing because the large blue Jeep whose tailwind just gave him a faceful of Mizaponytail would likely have turned him into a pancake had he paused to contemplate it.

Things happen very quickly afterwards. Anna and Vector flash the same conspiratorial grin at one another and take off to god knows where. Yuma pouts at Shark and says something that Kaito doesn't catch because he's being literally dragged away from the directory area by an irate Rio and-okay, that's kind of a rude gesture to make at a sibling, and now he's standing awkwardly in the middle of Forever 21 while Mizael and Alit and Rio test various accessories against his hair and general person.

"Rio, can't you do something about this awful teal?" Mizael asks, looking slightly irritated as he returns yet another pair of earrings to the shelf.

"Maybe next time." Rio waves a hand in Kaito's general direction. "I know the guy from Heaven's Strings."

"I found a beret!" proclaims Alit, holding up something that Kaito can almost pretend is a hat if he looks hard enough.

"With matching infinity scarf," replies Mizael dryly, holding up a circular piece of gray fabric. "How do you guys feel about hipster Kaito?"

Rio snickers. Alit fakes a coughing attack. Kaito tries to muster up some outrage but only manages an eye roll.

* * *

The self-proclaimed dream team drags Kaito through so many stores that he is legitimately dizzy by the time they arrive at the food court on the second floor. He's carrying four bags full of things like jeans without permanent marker stains on them and the beret-scarf combo that Alit insisted he wear at least once and the Dratini-wing earrings that Mizael located on one of the novelty carts and the box from the new boots Rio bought him when he wasn't looking and subsequently forced him to wear in lieu of his battered Converse, and he's pretty sure that he's only footed like ten percent of the bill because Rio and Mizael and Alit shooed him away from the counter in sync every time he tried to pay.

Rio casts one disgusted glance at the semicircle of fast-food places before heading straight for the Cinnabon on the fringes of the food court. Kaito finds himself jogging to catch up with her for the second time that day.

"I thought we were going to eat lunch."

Rio rolls her eyes. "Please, Kaito. Both of us could make better rice balls in Baria Dorm's kitchen."

"_You_ could, probably." Kaito scans the menu in a futile attempt to locate something that won't place him in a sugar coma.

"Kaito. You're rooming and you're not dead. I'm pretty sure you can cook."

"I bet he blew up a rice cooker or something," says Alit in a stage whisper, and Kaito freezes in his tracks because, actually, that's exactly what happened; he and Haruto made the grave mistake of trying to have a tabletop duel while the rice was going and suddenly the alarm was beeping like mad and the kitchen was full of smoke and he's pretty sure he taught his sibling a few new swear words in his endeavors to scour the charred remnants of the cereal grain from the counter and the stove and-well, everything, pretty much-before his dad got home.

"I think," begins Mizael carefully as he catches sight of Kaito's expression. "I think...he_ did_ blow up a rice cooker."

"The rice cooker in question is still fully functional," snaps Kaito, cheeks burning.

"Holy shit," breathes Alit in awe. "That makes you worse than _me."_

"Stole the words right out of my mouth," says Rio cheerfully, ignoring Alit's wounded "Hey!" as she grins at Kaito. "Your face is all red. Maybe you should do something about that."

"I don't like you," says Kaito to thin air, because Rio's already ordering a pecan-topped something or other and a medium lemonade_ (no, not diet, who even orders diet anything at a place that literally sells plated sugar) _and Mizael's stepped into the line too by now so he's left with Alit and his obnoxious fit of laughter.

"Are you done?"

"No."

Kaito joins the line and orders the least sugary thing on the menu and tries to ignore Alit humming that stupid nursery rhyme about sitting in a tree in his right ear.

* * *

They get their food (as relative as the term may be) and sit down, and pretty soon they're joined by Yuma who's demanding a Pokemon battle again and Shark who's poking idly at the cinnamon bun he was probably bullied into buying because it's even plainer than Kaito's, and Anna and Vector arguing the merits of some type of fire emblem and toting bags from GameStop and Five Below. Kaito tries a piece of the cinnamon bun and it's...different, warm and sticky and sweet and, huh, he doesn't think he's ever actually tried eating one of these, so he digs in with more gusto.

"Is this your first time eating Cinnabon?" Shark raises an eyebrow.

"Mmf," replies Kaito eloquently.

Shark sighs and shoves his untouched roll across the table, the universal gesture for "I'm not going to eat this," and Kaito contemplates thanking him before he catches sight of Shark's scowl and decides against it. He finishes Shark's roll around the same time everyone else finishes the first of whatever they've bought and leans back slightly in his chair, listening to the conversation around him. Gradually, he picks out small details: Alit's blatant invasion of Mizael's personal space bubble and the latter's annoyed acquiescence, Vector's odd habit of phrasing things so that it sounds like every one of his sentences is a question, Rio's dry wit, Yuma and Shark holding hands under the table, the way Anna's puns go unnoticed (until they don't and there's an exclamation of "God damn it" amidst a chorus of groans.)

"So tell us, Kaito," says Anna suddenly, eyes glittering as she leans across the table. "What did you think of my driving?"

"The person who issued you a license," responds Kaito, poking impassively at a minuscule piece of cinnamon roll with his fork, "should be placed under arrest."

The table erupts in raucous laughter.

"Congratulations, you're coming next week too!" yells Anna over the cacophony.

Kaito lets out a vicious swear, prompting a second round of snickers, and suddenly everyone's talking to him all at once: _did you know Anna's never gotten a driving ticket, the only time we got in an accident was when Mizael drove to 7-Eleven and we got sideswiped by this pickup, oh my god we have to do that again-NO, not get in another accident, I meant we have to take Kaito to 7-Eleven you idiot._ They tell him about assorted trips to the ramen bar and the karaoke spot and the inner city and about that time Vector's twin Shingetsu tagged along one week and caused the infamous Movie Theatre Incident, and suddenly Kaito's entire spring recess is being mapped out for him in the memory bank of someone's iPhone.

"Why?" asks Kaito, and no one understands his question except for Yuma.

"Our motto is 'friends drag friends to the ends of the earth in a bright pink death trap'," responds the other, not looking up from the list on his phone. "Video game store or clothing outlet?"

Kaito casts his vote for video game store and the table explodes again but he's not really paying too much attention to the massive debate his decision has sparked because, well, _friends. _And it doesn't even matter that this is coming from Yuma, who probably tries to make friends with plants in botany lab, because Kaito's never particularly cared enough to find someone to hang out with and all of a sudden he's part of this ragtag group of people who are loud and potentially terrifying but also willing to feed him and drag him places and buy him four bags' worth of god knows what simply because he's their _friend._

* * *

Friend-plural-friends-spelled-eff-ahr-ai-ee-ehn-dee-ess. Kaito tries the word out later on, after the second round of Hitsue Mall and the not-completely-terrible drive home because Vector is a marginally better driver than Anna and the unpacking of his new wardrobe complete with Rio invading his room again and disposing of like half his clothes while he's eating the sushi she left in his fridge, and it feels weird, sounds weird, but there's a matching memory and a smile on his face.

_I wonder if "friend" is the right word for Rio Kamishiro, _muses the voice in Kaito's brain, and there it is again, that weird drop in his stomach that's been happening all day and-

-and _nothing, _that's what. He's going to finish this sushi and fold these shirts and find his notes for Monday's class and then maybe play Pokemon until he falls asleep and Not Think About This, and it almost works until he wakes up the next morning with the 3DS over his face and discovers that when he restarted the game he accidentally named Fennekin after _her._


End file.
